Hummer is the manly brand but there's a woman at wheel

May 19, 2005|By Steven Cole Smith, Sentinel Columnist

I'm not sure what you would expect the general manager of Hummer, arguably the most manly, macho brand in the automotive world, to look like, but I'm confident you would not expect him to look like Susan Docherty.

Because Docherty is, after all, a her, not a him. A poised, well-dressed, confident woman who, at age 41, became one of the youngest general managers at General Motors when she was named to the position in August.

She assumed control of the brand from bookish Mike DiGiovanni, who had run Hummer since 1999, and did not look and sound that much like the Hummer general manager either, assuming we were expecting some version of the Marlboro Man. DiGiovanni was made the executive director of strategic marketing, which is a new position that GM says is "leading the increased focus on intermediate to long-term strategies," such as possibly closing a brand or two, we suspect.

Anyway, Docherty began her GM career in 1986 at GM of Canada, where she worked in sales, service and marketing. In 1994, she transferred to the United States to work for GM's North American Strategy Board. Then she was named manager of international marketing and communications for GM Europe in Switzerland, then director of marketing and advertising for Cadillac and Chevrolet in Germany. She returned to the United States in 1999 as Cadillac's marketing director for the Escalade family of vehicles, a position she held before being selected for a yearlong training program as a Distinguished Sloan Fellow at Stanford University.

GM has had quite a few high-level female executives, but Docherty could be the first to actually end up running the company. She is driven, running both her division and her exceptionally busy family life from an overheated BlackBerry, but she remains oddly accessible, even-handed and willing to listen.

She is committed to making Hummer a premium brand, and toward that end she fought to lengthen Hummer's warranty from three years/36,000 miles, to four years/50,000 miles, like Cadillac's. And on the new Hummer H3, OnStar, which is GM's ultra-successful emergency communications system, is standard, not optional, even on the least-expensive model. "This is a complicated brand, and Susan has learned it very, very quickly," said a GM executive.

Docherty knows things are tough at GM, but she and the company have been there before. "I can tell you, it wasn't that much fun in 1991 and '92, but we got through that tough period. We'll get through this one too."

If Docherty's name and face are familiar, you might have seen her in a TV commercial: Five female General Motors executives appear separately in a series of spots that are part of the "Only GM" corporate ad campaign. Besides Docherty and her daughter, there's Barbara Whittaker, executive director of global purchasing and supply chain; Jill Lajdziak, general manager of Saturn; Lori Queen, vehicle line executive for small cars; and Kim Kosak, general director of advertising and sales promotion for Chevrolet.

I've met three of those five women. I assure you: They belong at the head table.

THE LATE LEN MORGAN

Before I started writing about cars, I wrote about airplanes. Two writers had a profound impact on me. One was Gordon Baxter, a Texan who turned 80 last year in a nursing home, and Len Morgan, a former Boeing 747 airline captain. Both men wrote for Flying magazine, which has not been the same since they retired. I got to know Baxter pretty well and consider him one of the most gifted writers who ever lived.

Morgan died recently at 82 in Palm Harbor. His style was easy and elegant, totally absent the condescension that any man who has flown a 747 could legitimately inflict upon all of us mere civilians.

I was writing for a much lesser magazine, for $30 a story -- enough to cover an hour of plane rental -- when I reviewed a book by Morgan in the newspaper I was working for. I received a very nice note from him, and even better, he mentioned that he liked a story I'd written in that little magazine that I was confident no one had seen, much less Len Morgan. It meant a lot. Still does, more than 20 years later.

It reminds me of a particularly embarrassing little story too: I happened to be at the Dallas-Fort Worth International Airport on Aug. 2, 1985, flying in from Denver after spending a few days in Colorado with the Soldier of Fortune magazine staff. As we were landing, a tiny, terrible thunderstorm hit, causing Delta Flight 191, a Lockheed L-1011, to crash onto a highway bordering the airport, then hit a pair of enormous water tanks. Including passengers and crew, 136 people died, plus a man driving a Honda that was struck by one of the plane's three engines.

The next week I wrote a lengthy, detailed report on the crash and its probable cause for my newspaper. I went way out on a limb, and my editors were very nervous, but everything I speculated about was eventually supported by official investigations.